So I wake up around 6:30 am. This is not uncommon. Pregnancy has made me wake up around 4:00 or so every night and then only have some very light sleep until Sam and I both get out of bed around 8:00. 6:30 is also roughly when Hubby begins to get ready for work. As I lay there, trying to go back to sleep, I notice Hubby seems to be making a lot more noise than usual as he prepares for the day. He has shut the bedroom door, as he always does, but I can still hear him stomping around the hall, closing other doors rather loudly, and then, at one point, I hear him talking in his regular phone voice. My husband has the loudest phone voice of anyone I have ever heard, with the exception of the two that can at least match him, his father and brother. So I’m laying there wondering why he is doing absolutely nothing to keep his voice down since he knows we are trying to sleep, why he is slamming doors, why it sounds like he is literally running in the hall. I decide that he has gotten a call from work asking him to come in early, which is possible since the judge he works for is currently the “emergency back-up,” meaning that this week Hubby is, in fact, supposed to be ready in the event of a judge-like emergency to go to work. So I envision him running around the house, having just received the call, trying to get ready as quickly as possible. I go back to sleep.

Amazingly, Sam and I sleep until nearly 9:00 (uh, time change anyone?). We come out to the living room and I put Sam down to play while I go to the kitchen. Next thing I know Sam is bringing me Cheerios from the floor in the living room. When I go in to see where he is getting them I find Cheerios spread randomly over the whole room. I happen to notice that there are even more covering our patio outside. I think back to the noise this morning and put on my thinking cap to solve this odd Cheerio mystery. Sam is still in the background, “O, O, O,” as he continues to find cereal on the floor. When I go back to the kitchen I see the cereal container has been left open on the counter and our couch blanket has been stuffed into the hamper. I don’t want to pull it out to see why for fear that it is just more cat vomit for me to clean up. I try to figure out what would posess my husband to throw Cheerios all over the patio and spill them in our living room without cleaning them up. Was he trying to attract squirrels to the deck for Sam to see when he woke up? Did he just have an accident in his rush and didn’t have to time to clean it up? But then why the cereal outside? I come to the logical conclusion: there was some sort of animal out on the patio, like a raccoon (we live on the 2nd floor, by the way. How a raccoon would get up there I have no idea but that’s what made sense to me at the time), Hubby called some sort of animal rescue line (the phone call I heard) to come out and get it and then for some reason decided to throw Cheerios at it while he waited and also ran back and forth down the hall a few times trying to decide if he should wake me up to show me. Eventually it left on his own, he called the animal rescue to say they didn’t need to come, and left for work late as a result of the drama. This is the story I concocted this morning. That’s how it could have happened…

Hubby and I played phone tag for about an hour this morning as I waited to impress him with my fine mystery solving skills. When I finally got him on the phone I told him my theory as he laughed at me.

In reality, Hubby woke up in the dark and without his glasses. In the living room, the cats were running around going crazy and as Hubby looked up he saw there was something flying around in circles on the ceiling. Please understand this is actually not that odd for him because he has this weird recurring thing where when he’s still half asleep he imagines he sees things flying around on the ceiling…seriously. It’s like he’s been having visions preparing him for this day. This morning it was not his imagination, however. There was, indeed, a bat flying around our living room. And as he’s explaining this to me I’m wondering how the hell a bat got into our apartment and then I have one of those flashback moments that movie characters have where they go back and see that integral moment that has brought them to this crucial point in time. For me, I go back to yesterday afternoon when Sam and I were playing out on the patio because it was such a nice afternoon. I see myself run in to get a jacket as I leave the door open. Then I do the same thing when I go in to get Sam his cup of milk. Again to get the camera. Then as we come in one of the cats gets out so I have to chase it around on the porch trying to corral it back inside. The screen door was open the whole time…”Oh. Whoops!” I say. “Yeah, whoops,” he says.

So imagine, if you will, Hubby wakes up in his sleepy haze and finds a bat, according to him a “big one,” flying around our living room as the cats freak out. He runs down the hall to shut the doors to the other rooms. He runs back and tries to shield himself with the blanket from the couch as he yells in fear. He tries to get the bat to fly out into the hallway (so that it can attack our neighbors?) and this doesn’t work. He tries to shoo it outside through the patio door using the blanket. He yells some more (I told you when he talks on the phone he’s REALLY loud - it could easily have been mistaken for a phone call…from his employer). He remembers that bats eat bugs while they fly around so he decides to try and lure it outside by throwing Cheerios into the air outside the door in hopes of it following. Yeah. So he’s wrapped in a blanket throwing Cheerios out the door while shielding himself from the bat using a blanket and whimpering every time it comes near him. In retrospect I’m shocked that this didn’t make a lot more noise than it did. Eventually, it flew out on its own after circling nearer and nearer to the door. I couldn’t have made up a story so good.

The question is, where was this thing all night? The door was shut for the last time around 5:30 last night. The bat left around 7:00 this morning. Where the hell was it all night…while we slept…in our bed…? I’ve searched the place for bat poo and can’t find anything. For all I know we have a whole family camped out somewhere in here.

Labels: Absolute Favorite Posts, Hubby, Tales